Cotterell: Speaking of sexual harassment (and other stuff)

A few random thoughts, ideas, suggestions, complaints and observations on a news-lite holiday weekend.

•If it were up to me, the news of Charles Manson’s death would have been a three-paragraph brief on page 4. News is usually defined as things that are interesting, surprising or important, and this just barely met the first criteria.

He didn’t contribute or accomplish anything, so he wasn’t important. He was 83 years old, so death was unsurprising. And he was a figure of interest only in a long-ago, ghoulish sort of gawking.

His obit was one of those that makes you think, “Oh, he was still alive?”

•Not to be a spoiler, but this is not some great pivotal, historic moment regarding sexual harassment. It’s good that women are speaking out and that the abuses by powerful men are being exposed.

But we saw this in 1992, with the Navy’s “Tailhook” scandal and the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. That was “the year of the woman,” with record numbers of women elected to Congress. But it was also the year of Bill Clinton, who, shall we say, made his own memorable mark.

Don’t get me wrong: If even small reforms are made, in Tallahassee and Washington, to make men pay attention and to help women come forward, that’s good. But if the past is any indicator, things will settle back to pretty much what they were.

•Speaking of that, one thing that’s going to have to change is secrecy in settlements. Without admitting wrongdoing, U.S. Rep. John Conyers has acknowledged a $27,000 payment to a former employee, and California Rep. Jackie Speier says she knows of some $17 million in settlements over several years paid to congressional employees who were victims of harassment and other discrimination.

As Florida legislators learned some 30 years ago, you can’t make secret settlements with public money. If nothing else, Congress has to change that – and when secrecy ends, some of the sexual harassment probably will, too.

•As the Legislature gets cranked up in little more than a month, two of the most important issues will be debated across the street, in the Florida Supreme Court.

One is the dispute over whether Gov. Rick Scott, or his successor, gets to appoint three justices. Terms of three justices expire on inauguration day, a tick of the clock before — or after — Scott officially leaves office and his successor takes over.

There’s no telling if the next governor would appoint justices to the right or left of those Scott might choose. But a solid conservative majority on the bench would seriously affect the next governor’s term, whoever it is.

The other big case will be a challenge to the huge education package, known as House Bill 7069, that the Legislature enacted last session. Education is the most important and expensive thing state government does, and they’re never done with it.

The next governor will have some school plans, too, and so will the 2019-20 Legislature. But what the court does with last session’s education package is as important as whatever comes next.

•And then, there’s the Constitution Revision Commission. The 37-member panel is currently considering a wide range of changes in the basic framework of state government, and we won’t know until spring what it produces.

Considering who appointed most of them – Scott and presiding officers of the House and Senate – it’s probably not going to be wild-eyed liberalism. But anything put on the ballot next year will have to get 60 percent public approval at the polls, a requirement that didn’t exist when the last CRC made its proposals 20 years ago.

That poses an interesting quandary.

The more bold the commission gets, the more sweeping its changes, the harder it is to get to 60 percent. The more you try to do, the more there is to dislike in it.

And in effect, every “No” vote is equal to 1.5 “Yes” votes, in a public referendum.

But if the commission is cautious, and proposes only a few tepid changes, what’s the point of getting 37 busy people to serve nearly two years on the CRC? If all they want to do is close the write-in loophole in primary elections, the Legislature could do that the old way.

Then you have to figure that the amendments are printed at the end of the ballot, which looks to be a long one. There will be a big fall-off in voter interest, after they vote in the U.S. Senate, governor and Cabinet, congressional, judicial and local races.